UPCOMING NOVELS

Passing through Prince Street

Prince Street embodied the roiling melting pot that was America at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The street’s pushcarts and stores bustled with recent immigrants, building new lives. The novel is mainly set in this period, yet it begins over a hundred years later, when Nathan Segal visits the graves of his mother, Rose, an aunt, Dorothy, and grandparents, Harry and Lena Pittl in the Beth Mordechai Cemetery. Nathan also encounters the mysterious grave of Thomas Jeremiah Jones, der schvartzer khazzin/The Black Cantor. The novel shifts back in time and place to follow Harry Pittl’s flight from his native Poland to avoid that country’s draft, which was weaponized against its Jewish population. But there is another more subtle kind of immigration happening simultaneously. Newark, New Jersey has become a major destination for the Great Migration of blacks out of America’s Deep South and into the more liberal de facto segregation of the Northern United States. In Newark, some black families, living in close proximity to Jewish neighbors, have integrated into Jewish culture. This novel explores how the lives of these two diverse ethnicities intertwined while passing through Prince Street.

Challenger Confidential

In the Space Transportation Program of NASA, there have been two fatal space shuttle disasters: the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003. After the Challenger disaster, a presidential commission, the Rogers Commission, was formed to investigate the mechanical and human causes of the catastrophic failure. Many factors were identified, but others were not… notably, the absence of Administrator James Beggs. He had resigned in order to defend himself from an indictment for fraud during earlier employment at General Dynamics. That case turned out to be completely bogus, and the actions of the ambitious assistant attorney general handling the indictment and prosecution resulted in an apology being issued by the Department of Justice. The hiatus in shuttle development activities at NASA following the Challenger disaster provides an interesting point of departure for this novel. Russian companies were being paid, notably by pharmaceutical companies, to conduct research in space. While facilities in the USA were out of bounds, could Russian agents have approached personnel at the Johnson Space Center and other locations to lease facilities and personnel to secretly continue advancing the American space effort? Could the rapid progress made by NASA to relaunch the Shuttle Program after the pause in activities following the Challenger disaster have been partially due to confidential offshore research and cooperation? ‘Challenger Confidential’ charts the fictional exploits of Noah Schwartz, a researcher in human nutrition and elimination, at the Johnson Space Center and Sammy Greenbaum, a Russian immigrant, stock trader at Lehman Brothers and president of Energo, the American division of Energia, a major producer of Russian spacecraft. The two meet at a Houston synagogue. Sammy creates the infrastructure for a heroic effort to both advance American efforts in the shuttle program during the hiatus and provide much needed funding to Energia which is trying to keep its Buran program afloat in the face of the disintegration of the USSR. The story takes place mainly in the late Eighties as developments in information technology are beginning to change the landscape of scientific research and communication. Noah and Sammy use new technology and Jewish tradition to navigate an increasingly difficult climate for their daring efforts. Along with a small team of rocket scientists, they diligently work to advance the shuttle program, knowing that their efforts will be thankless, dangerous and absolutely confidential. Success means remaining unknown.